1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an ink jet recording method and to records made by the method.
2. Related Art
Glossy coatings can be made on a print by several methods, for example, by printing with an ink containing golden brass powder, silvery aluminum fine particles, or any other powdery material, by stamping with metallic foil, or by thermal transfer with metallic foil.
However, coatings of an ink containing golden or silvery powder are relatively matt colours and hardly have specular gloss because the particle diameter of the metallic powder is as large as 10 μm to 30 μm. Stamping or thermal transfer with metallic foil, in which a printing medium is coated with an adhesive, a flat and smooth sheet of metallic foil is pressed onto the medium, and then the medium and the sheet are heat-sealed, admittedly provides relatively high gloss but on the other hand includes many steps involving the use of pressure or heat; thus, these methods can be performed only with media resistant to heat and deformation.
Ink jet printing has recently been used in a wide variety of applications, for example, metallic printing. For example, JP-A-2008-174712 has proposed a dispersion and an ink composition containing flat-plate aluminum particles.
Unfortunately, aluminum particles for ink jet printing need be made resistant to water and weather in advance to ensure the gloss of the resultant prints and for other purposes. Worse yet, large aluminum particles for improved gloss may be lacking in rubbing fastness on the resultant prints and in dispersion stability in an ink composition.
To solve these problems, the present inventors have conducted extensive research on the use of glitter pigments, which are highly stable chemicals, in forming glossy images by ink jet printing, and found that glitter pigments having a certain particle diameter can exist in ink in a stable dispersion state and give the images formed therewith both high gloss and high fastness to rubbing.